AI-dentifying whales in the Arctic
Will machine learning technology designed to detect marine mammals scale up the quality and quantity of marine mammal data?
As people around the world celebrate World Whale Day later this month, artificial intelligence (AI) is quietly working behind the scenes to support whale research. One project, called Flukebook, is tasked with identifying individual whales and dolphins based on photos taken of their flukes (tails). Another called Project CETI hopes to use machine learning to "understand what sperm whales are saying, and hopefully also talk back to them." In Canada, Möbius, developed by Whale Seeker, is searching through 100,000 aerial images for whales and other marine mammals in the Arctic for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO).
Without AI, "it would take maybe six months to a year for one person to go through 50,000 images," says Charry Tissier, CEO and co-founder of Whale Seeker. By using Möbius to do the job in a fraction of the time, DFO hopes to free up expertise, expand monitoring and other marine mammal projects, and include the most up-to-date science in decision-making.
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